VII. Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Twindividuality

3. Planetary Physiosphere: Anatomics, Economics, Urbanomics

Isalgue, Antonio, et al. Scaling Laws and the Modern City. Physica A. 382/643, 2007. From the Barcelona School of Architecture, another breakthrough advance to situate and quantify human societies as a further emergent exemplar of life’s universal self-organizing form and dynamics.

Complex systems such as living organisms are known to follow approximate relationships as scaling laws between the variables that describe them. Some of these kinds of relationships are tested in relation to modern developed urban spaces, in which it is possible to find a reasonable continuity with the types of scales seen in living organisms… (643) Then, we should learn from phenomenological relations in existing complex systems that have evolved over hundreds of millennia. As living organisms represent one of these systems, which have been largely studied, and are a paradigm of complexity, studying general laws or general relationships in biology might give us an insight into our problem. In fact, it seems reasonable to conjecture that the coarse-grained behavior of living systems might obey quantifiable universal laws that capture the systems’ essential features. (643-644)

Jamtveit, Bjorn, et al. Scaling Properties of European Research Units. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 106/13160, 2009. Norwegian scientists confirm results from U. S. studies that laboratory teams consistently express a nested, modular, repetitive structure, to an extent as to imply an independent principle at work.

On the basis of research and development expenditure and research output data from 719 United States Universities, Plerou et al. (2) concluded that the distribution of growth rates displays a ‘‘universal’’ form, independently of the size of the university. Although these authors did not address how research units actually grow and how the organizational infrastructure evolves, the observed similarities across scales hint at an underlying scale-independent ‘‘growth principle.’’ (13160)

Jencks, Charles. The Architecture of the Jumping Universe. London: Academy Editions, 1997. The British architect advocates a nature-based design approach which aligns with new understandings of a dynamic, self-organized fractal universe. An introduction to complexity science serves as a guide for innovative, friendly buildings and landscapes. By this reading and activity, the creative human role is most of all to learn what the universe is and might become.

The whole universe is trying to discover its own being, and we are at the forefront of this cosmic lust for knowledge. (51) What is the cosmogenic world view? It is the idea that the universe is a single, unfolding, self-organizing event, something more like an animal than machine, something radically interconnected and creative, an entity that jumps suddenly to higher level of organization and delights us as it does so. (125)

Jose, Marco and Ruth Bishop. Scaling Properties and Symmetrical Patterns in the Epidemiology of Rotavirus Infection. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society of London B. 358/1625, 2003. A “scale-free power-law fractal scaling behavior” is found for the spread of viral epidemics through human populations.

Kennedy, Christopher. Urban Metabolism. http://www.eoearth.org/article/Urban_metabolism. An entry in The Encyclopedia of Earth by the University of Toronto civil engineer discusses various attempts to appreciate citified human settlements in terms of a viable, homeostatic anatomy and physiology. See also for example: Zhang, Yan, et al “Ecological Network and Emergy Analysis of Urban Metabolic Systems” in Ecological Modelling (220/1431, 2009) for studies of four Chinese cities.

The concept of an urban metabolism provides a means of understanding the sustainable development of cities by drawing analogy with the metabolic processes of organisms. In practice the study of an urban metabolism (in urban ecology) requires quantification of the inputs, outputs and storage of energy, water, nutrients, materials and wastes.

Kennedy, Christopher, et al. Energy and Material Flows of Megacities. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 112/5985, 2015. Thirty scientists from Canada, Italy, China, India, Philippines, Korea, Brazil, USA, UK, France Indonesia, Nigeria, Iran, Bangladesh, Argentina, Egypt, Pakistan, Mexico, and Turkey analyze ultraurban areas by way of these organic metabolic physiologies.

Understanding the drivers of energy and material flows of cities is important for addressing global environmental challenges. Accessing, sharing, and managing energy and material resources is particularly critical for megacities, which face enormous social stresses because of their sheer size and complexity. Here we quantify the energy and material flows through the world’s 27 megacities with populations greater than 10 million people as of 2010. Collectively the resource flows through megacities are largely consistent with scaling laws established in the emerging science of cities. Correlations are established for electricity consumption, heating and industrial fuel use, ground transportation energy use, water consumption, waste generation, and steel production in terms of heating-degree-days, urban form, economic activity, and population growth. The results help identify megacities exhibiting high and low levels of consumption and those making efficient use of resources. The correlation between per capita electricity use and urbanized area per capita is shown to be a consequence of gross building floor area per capita, which is found to increase for lower-density cities. Many of the megacities are growing rapidly in population but are growing even faster in terms of gross domestic product (GDP) and energy use. (Abstract)

Konar, Megan, et al. Water for Food: The Global Virtual Water Trade Network. Water Resources Research. 47/W05520, 2011. As these articles are being logged in across natural, personal, and societal domains, quite disparate fields, one cannot help but notice an increasing report, often word for word, of a universal self-organizing, complex adaptive system, with the same pattern and processes everywhere. Here via node and network terms, a team from Princeton University, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, and the National Institute for Environmental Studies, Tsukuba, Japan, find continental aqueous flows and usages to equally adopt such features. See also by this group “Structure and Controls of the Global Virtual Water Trade Network” in Geophysical Research Letters (38/L10403, 2011).

We present a novel conceptual framework and methodology for studying virtual water trade. We utilize complex network theory to analyze the structure of the global virtual water trade associated with the international food trade. In the global virtual water trade network, the nations that participate in the international food trade correspond to the nodes, and the links represent the flows of virtual water associated with the trade of food from the country of export to the country of import. (W05520)

Lee, Y., et al. Universal Features in the Growth Dynamics of Complex Organizations. Physical Review Letters. 81/15, 1998. The gross domestic product of 152 countries exhibits the same power law scaling, another sign of an independent invariance everywhere.

Lehner, Mark. Fractal House of Pharaoh: Ancient Egypt as a Complex Adaptive System. Timothy Kohler and George Gumerman, eds. Dynamics in Human and Primate Societies. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Classical Egyptian society with its array of “households within households” exhibits a scale-free structure which repeats the same pattern in a nested hierarchy. The author sees these findings as an example of how nonlinear science can bring a novel understanding to past and present human settlements.

I offer a prospectus for approaching Egyptian civilization as a complex adaptive system based on loose analogies with concepts of emergent order and self-organization. This is a narrative exploration of ways that ancient Egyptian society may be amenable to the kind of agent-based modeling applied to small-scale societies. (276)

Li, Shouwei, et al. Network Entropies of the Chinese Financial Market. Entropy. 18/9, 2016. We note this paper by Southeast University, Nanjing, China researchers as an example, among many, of the same ubiquitous, dynamic multiplexities as found everywhere else from brains to galaxies.

Based on the data from the Chinese financial market, this paper focuses on analyzing three types of network entropies of the financial market, namely, Shannon, Renyi and Tsallis entropies. The findings suggest that Shannon entropy can reflect the volatility of the financial market, that Renyi and Tsallis entropies also have this function when their parameter has a positive value, and that Renyi and Tsallis entropies can reflect the extreme case of the financial market when their parameter has a negative value. (Abstract)

Li, Xiang, et al. Complexity and Synchronization of the World Trade Web. Physica A. 328/287, 2003. The same scale-free network dynamics characterize an internationally connected economy as they do the Internet.

Li, Yi, et al. . Incorporating Textual Network Improves Chinese Stock Market Analysis. Nature Scientific Reviews. 10/20944, 2020. At the close of this year, Shanxi University of Finance and Economics analysts offer another cross-correlation between diverse subject areas. The title network model which is broadly used to parse literary documents is similarly applied to analyze financial stock transactions. Our interest is to note that nature’s network dynamic geometry, in turn, can be considered to have a literary essence. See also Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking in Quantum Finance by Ivan Arraut, et al in Europhysics Letters (131/6, 2020) for a companion study and Yang-Hui He’s paper Universe as Big Data (arXiv:2011.14442) for generally the same idea.

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